Transcript:

Racial politics after World War II changed the Filipino American community in the Pajaro Valley. The passage of the 1945 War Brides Act led to the arrival of Filipinas to California. Filipinos also filed petitions to unify their families and bring kin across the Pacific to the Pajaro Valley. The Filipino American community continued to grow after 1965 when the Hart-Cellar Act opened immigration to America. The resulting waves of newly arrived migrants brought with them ideas of what it meant to be “authentically Filipino.” Many of our mixed-race oral history narrators expressed that they felt excluded by some members of the growing community. Nevertheless, they also asserted their inclusion. 

Juanita Sulay Wilson: In the 1950s, children of the manong and manang did not have a space of their own to celebrate Filipino and American youth culture. Taking matters into their own hands, mixed-race Filipino American children decided to start an organization modeled after the social clubs led by Filipino adults but with a twist: club members would perform native Philippine dances and also pass the time together listening to the latest Rock ‘n’ Roll hits. In this clip, Juanita Sulay Wilson, the daughter of Mamerto and Virginia Sulay, discusses The Filipino Youth Club, an organization that she and her peers created when they were in high school to claim their Filipino American identity. 

We wanted a club of our own. We were teenagers. We wanted something of our own. […] We used to call ourselves ‘Flips,’ not knowing that it was an insult to our peers, because we didn’t know it was not the thing to say, at the time […] but we were finding our own identity. Even though we were Filipinos, we knew we were Filipinos, but we wanted something to say that we were Filipinos, and we were proud of it.

Maurice Carrillo: In this clip, Maurice Carrillo describes an incident in the late 1970s at the Filipino Community of Watsonville, an organization to which he hoped to contribute in a meaningful way. During his visit, however, members of the Filipino community challenged Maurice’s Filipino identity. In this interview, Maurice uses a term to describe mixed-race identity that was common at the time. Today, some consider this term to be offensive.

When my wife and I were married, we–we did go back to Watsonville together and we went to the Filipino club that was there, just to check it out and see, maybe we need to reconnect with our Filipino roots in Watsonville. And the unfortunate thing that happened when we were at this Filipino meeting, they were all full-blooded Filipino. And here we are half breeds. And someone stood up and said, ‘We don’t want any coconuts in our organization.’ Well, that was a direct stab at us half breeds, we were the coconuts that were half white, half Filipino. So that dissuaded us from going back and we never did go back.